Any discussion of documents, devices, acts or knowledge in this specification is included to explain the context of the invention. It should not be taken as an admission that any of the material forms a part of the prior art base or the common general knowledge in the relevant art in Australia or elsewhere on or before the priority date of the disclosure herein.
The development of the Internet has made a huge amount of content available to web-users. Never before has so much raw data, information, documents and/or files been available to so many. This sheer volume of network content has created its own problems as well as its own opportunities—one of which has been the tremendous popularity of the search engine. As effective as search engine's are at finding raw information, web-users still have little way of knowing if the information contained within a particular website is reputable and accurate, or misleading and deceptive.
A system and/or method for at least partially alleviating this problem is disclosed in International Patent Application No.: PCT/AU2008/000505, filed on 9 Apr. 2008, in the name of the present applicant, Web Evaluation Pty Ltd, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by this reference thereto. This system enables web-users to evaluate the relevance and/or reputability of WWW content by providing an independent forum facility that can be displayed side-by-side with WWW content being viewed. In this way, web-users can utilise the forum facilities provided to help them make informed decisions regarding the WWW content they are viewing.
However, with so much WWW content available and that content continuing to grow at an exponential rate, its becoming harder for web-users to efficiently sift through the volume of information to find the exact information they require or information that they are likely to be interested in. Existing search engines find raw information based on key-words entered by web-users. These search engines use various techniques to return results that are deemed to be of relevance based on the key-words submitted. The order of display of results within a search engine graphical user interface (hereinafter simply referred to as “GUI”) is often determined based on proprietary popularity algorithms that take into consideration various aspects, as for example, the amount of times a website has been visited and/or the amount of instances of a key-word within the raw results located.
A problem with key-word based searching, and known search engines in general, is that it is often difficult to determine what key-words to use to find results of high relevance. For example, in the case of novice web-users, often the key-words that are selected are broad, or non-descriptive, which obviously leads to an enormous amount of irrelevant search results being returned when a search is performed. The problems associated with key-word based searching are exacerbated by the different meanings given to the same words used throughout the world.
A further problem with existing search engines is that because they use centralised databases to index the WWW, it is impossible for them to maintain an up-to-date index of dynamically generated websites. For this reason, relevant content of such websites may not be returned when a search is performed.
A need therefore exists for an improved system and/or method to enable web-users to discover relevant WWW content whilst navigating the web.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and/or method for linking network content.